Lawrence Liang Gets Infosys Prize-2017 for Social Sciences

Lawrence Liang, Professor, School of Law, Governance and Citizenship, Ambedkar University, Delhi, has been awarded the Infosys Prize 2017 for Social Sciences.

Lawrence Liang studied at the National Law School of India University and the Warwick University, and has been a Visiting Scholar at Yale, Michigan and several other universities. He is the co-founder of the Alternative Law Forum, Bengaluru, and has played a major role in incorporating Open Source ideas into the cultural domain. He has published widely in scholarly books and journals and is a prominent presence in public debates.

He has made outstanding contributions to the study of free speech, intellectual property and access to digitalized knowledge in India, from a comparative and global perspective. As a co-founder of the Alternative Law Forum, he has shown a remarkable commitment to widening access to legal resources for marginalized groups.

His work demonstrates how issues of intellectual property and piracy play out in the realm of law and media in India. Liang displays a deep grasp of the history of copyright issues in the West, and demonstrates the dynamics through which the domain of copyright protection, licensing and commodification has expanded in the era of liberal capitalism. His contributions have the potential of enriching not just our understanding of social progress but the methodological foundation of the social sciences.

Kaushik Basu, the jury chair, congratulated Liang by stating ‘Lawrence Liang has worked on copyright law, digital technologies and media and trying to understand the implications for individual freedom, rights and also for development. It is arguable that we're entering a world where intellectual property will be as important as used to be land rights, once upon a time. And so the kind of work that Lawrence Liang has done is likely to gain in importance for India and for countries around the world.’